.comment: Cold Turkey - page 3

Holiday Paradise -- Day One

July 5, 2001

By
Dennis E. Powell

I get back from the show to learn that
the Federal appellate court has, seems to me, disemboweled the
Microsoft antitrust ruling, and I'm desperate to write something
about it. Absent a way to do so, I am forced to reflect, and the
results are satisfying: The remedy imposed by Judge Thomas Penfield
Jackson wouldn't have done any good, anyway. The case had a goofy
premise -- Microsoft bundling a browser -- because the government's
one shot at doing any real good died when it folded like a cheap
horse show chair in its1994 case against the company and agreed to a
consent decree that did nothing at all. (For the historians among us,
the Justice Department had gone after Microsoft for anti-competitive
practices having to do with preloads, per-processor licenses to
original equipment manufacturers, marketing of vaporware, and
torpedoing of independent application developers. Bill Gates went to
the White House and met with Bill Clinton. Bill Gates went to China,
where Windows was declared the official operating system. Money began
to flow from China to Clinton. The case against Microsoft was
dropped. Probably all coincidence, but it is an interesting
set of facts.)

The current case was weird, in that
while Microsoft is guilty of lots of things that in my view justify
prosecution (probably under the RICO statutes), it was not in this
case charged with any of them. Nor would it do any good at all to
split up Microsoft. If leveling the playing field and promoting
competition in an essential industry were the goals, the way to do it
would be to prohibit preloads of Microsoft software and including the
price of Microsoft software in the cost of a new machine. Were people
forced to choose their software separately, they'd look at
alternatives.